An award-winning English and Social Studies teacher at Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento, Calif., Larry Ferlazzo is the author of Helping Students Motivate Themselves: Practical Answers To Classroom Challenges, The ESL/ELL Teacher's Survival Guide, and Building Parent Engagement In Schools.He also maintains the popular Websites of the Day blog. In this EdWeek blog, an experiment in knowledge-gathering, he will address readers' questions on classroom management, ELL instruction, lesson planning, and other issues facing teachers. Send your questions to [email protected]. And offer your own thoughts and responses in the comments section.

What Needs To Happen To Recruit & Retain More Teachers Of Color?

What impact can having more teachers of color have on our schools & what needs to be done to make it happen?

In light of the killings of African-American youth in Ferguson, Cleveland, and elsewhere, the issue of recruiting and retaining teachers of color has drawn more attention. Some groups and individuals have been working on that challenge for quite awhile, and others have taken note of it more recently. I'm embarrassed to say that I'm in the latter category. Here are links where you can read more about the concrete work of organizations and public bodies like Educolor, the Boston Public Schools, and the Montgomery County Schools. You can read about these efforts and others at the recent Education Week column, We Need Teachers Of Color and in a collection of other articles I've "curated."

During the next week, this blog will host contributions from researchers, teachers and students about this topic. I hope readers will share their own thoughts, too.

Please share your thoughts in the comments or, if you prefer, feel free to email them to me.

You can also send questions to me at [email protected].When you send one in, let me know if I can use your real name if it's selected or if you'd prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.

Anyone whose question is selected for this weekly column can choose one free book from a variety of education publishers.

Just a reminder -- you can subscribe and receive updates from this blog via email or RSS Reader..

And,if you missed any of the highlights from the first three years of this blog, you can find a categorized list of posts here, along with an "all-time" list of the ones that have been most popular. This year's posts aren't there, but you can find them by clicking on the archives found on the sidebar.

Categories:

Notice: We recently upgraded our comments. (Learn more here.) If you are logged in as a subscriber or registered user and already have a Display Name on edweek.org, you can post comments. If you do not already have a Display Name, please create one here.

Ground Rules for Posting
We encourage lively debate, but please be respectful of others. Profanity and personal attacks are prohibited. By commenting, you are agreeing to abide by our user agreement.
All comments are public.

The opinions expressed in Classroom Q&A With Larry Ferlazzo are strictly those of the author(s) and do not reflect the opinions or endorsement of Editorial Projects in Education, or any of its publications.